The exhibition, “20 Years of Restoring Sight,” celebrated the anniversary of Australia’s Fred Hollows Foundation, which has ties to Nepal via its ongoing partnership with the Til Ganga Institute of Ophthalmology in Kathmandu.[break]
“This is the story of vision restoration in Nepal and beyond,” said Satish Sharma, curator of the AusAID-led exhibition at the Siddhartha Art Gallery.
Notable photographs on the show include shots of remote eye camps in the Tarai, post-mortem eye cornea donations at Pashupatinath, and images from further abroad in North Korea’s Haeju Province.
A visitor looks at the photographs on display during the the inauguration of ‘Nepal & Australia: 20 years of restoring eyesight’ at Siddhartha Art Gallery, Babarmahal Revisited, Kathmandu on Tuesday.
There are also several candid shots of Dr Sanduk Ruit, founder and medical director of Til Ganga, with his late friend, namesake, and NGO founder, Fred Hollows of Australia.
“Fred had great foresight when he decided to assist me in taking modern cataract surgery to the most remote areas of Nepal,” said Dr Ruit. “He was a man of extremely straightforward and strong thinking who had very clear ideas.”
Dr Hollows passed away from cancer in 1993. Til Ganga and The Fred Hollows Foundation have been instrumental in restoring sight to countless Nepali, with the hospital alone having performed 200,000 cataract surgeries since its opening in 1994.
“I’m passionate about photography. And in this part of the world, being blind has a high price to pay, especially if you live in the hills,” said Sharma.
In addition to carrying out daily surgeries, managing a training hospital, and conducting rural eye camps, Til Ganga also operates an “eye bank” where corneas of the deceased are extracted at the Pashupatinath Temple’s funeral sites.
The eye bank receives roughly 300 sets of eyes annually, a number that is increasing yearly as organ donation is slowly de-stigmatized in Nepal.
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